DeepMind AI is able to make algorithms better than humans have imagined, creators claim
A new artificical intelligence system is able to create algorithms better and more powerful than humans have imagined, its creators say.
DeepMind, the Google sister company that has brought a number of machine learning breakthroughs, says the latest discovery is one step on its mission to use artificial intelligence to advance science.
Despite the fact that algorithms are used everywhere today, finding them is still incredibly difficult. For instance, mathematicians relied on a specific way to do matrix multiplication – and it wasn’t until 1969 that a researcher called Volken Strassen showed that there was actually a better way.
That kind of algorithm is still used in computers to this day, for everything from sharing videos on the internet to predicting the weather. And so even the most minor change to its efficiency could have widespread effects for the way our world works.
DeepMind’s system, called AlphaTensor, has already found algorithms that are more efficient than the existing state of the art systems for doing those calculations, its creators say. The algorithms that the AI is able to generate perform better than those that scientists have been considering and using for hundreds of years.
If the system is able to do that more and for other purposes, it could lead to considerable changes in the way that computers work, scientists say.
